TLG is pleased to announce the winners of its 2013 College Scholarships for Students of Parents with Disabilities. Funding was only available for seventeen scholarships, yet nearly 700 students from across the U.S. applied for these scholarships. There are an almost no scholarships for the hundreds of thousands of students who have parents with significant disabilities or medical conditions. These awards not only recognize the diversity and contributions of these families, but their financial need.

Scholarship winners include those whose mother or father has a disability as well as those families in which both parents have disabilities. Scholarships have been awarded to the following students:

Each award is a $1,000 college scholarship for an outstanding high school senior or college student who has at least one parent with a disability. Selection criteria included academic performance, community service, letters of recommendation and an essay describing the experience of growing up with a parent with a disability. Students applying for these scholarships included those with parents who were quadriplegic, blind, deaf, amputees, as well as parents with spinal cord injury, cancer, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, mental illness, ALS, HIV/AIDS, traumatic brain injury, muscular dystrophy or intellectual disability. As one of several projects of the National Center, these scholarships are primarily funded through the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR), U.S. Department of Education.